That the Old Testament presents a literary, and in particular a narrative, tradition that stands apart from those of neighbour-ing countries seems self-evident. Attempts to boost the image of the competing literatures may alter the detail, but they do not change the picture. Admittedly, the narrative continuum of the Pentateuch-Former Prophets (Genesis–2 Kings) of the Hebrew canon, or of Genesis-Esther in the English Bible tradition, sug-gests a connectedness that would not have been apparent at the time of the composition of the individual books. Still, the con-siderable dovetailing of some of the constituent books and their orientation towards a history outside themselves indicate that something more than last-minute editing has created this sense of continuity.
The view that the monotheistic faith of Israel has given birth to this narrative tradition is often associated nowadays with Ro-bert Alter and his 1981 volume on biblical narrative.40 The the-ory is, of course, much older than Alter, whose predecessors in the field include Gerhard von Rad41and Shemaryahu Talmon.42 When Alter first raises the question, he is consciously building on Talmon’s claim that, far from containing the vestiges of a na-tional epic, the Old Testament deliberately avoids epic because
(SMDSA, 7), Naples 1980; Idem, Zoroaster in History (Biennial Yarshater Lecture Series, 2), New York 2000.
38J.D.W. Watts, Isaiah 34–66 (WBC, 25), Waco 1987, 157.
39See J.D.W. Watts, Isaiah 1–33 (WBC, 24), Waco 1985, xxx.
40R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, London 1981.
41G. von Rad, ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing in Ancient Israel’, in:
G. von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, tr. E.W. True-man Dicken, Edinburgh 1966, 166-204 (translated from Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, M¨unchen 1958, 148-88. The essay, entitled ‘Der An-fang der Geschichtsschreibung im alten Israel’, first appeared in AKuG 32 [1944], 1-42).
42S. Talmon, ‘The “Comparative Method” in Biblical Interpretation – Principles and Problems’, VT.S 29 (1978), 320-56 (351-6).
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 57
of its pagan associations: the Old Testament writers ‘purposely nurtured and developed prose narration to take the place of the epic genre which by its content was intimately bound up with the world of paganism and appears to have had a special standing in the polytheistic cults’ (354).
Such a creative role for monotheism has been questioned, for example by David Gunn, who thinks that Alter is simply revert-ing to the values and judgments of the Biblical Theology period.43 Norman Whybray reckoned that Alter’s approach was too heav-ily final form, expecting too much from the final redactors of the biblical text. He also found it puzzling that narrative writing of the type so praised by Alter appears to have gone into decline in the very period when monotheism was in the ascendant. This, it will be clear, is predicated on certain assumptions about the age of the narrative books of the Old Testament. If in the main they originated in post-exilic times, different arguments would apply.
For some, the applicability of the term ‘monotheism’ to Israel-ite-Judean religion before the Babylonian exile is a major issue, but it may in any case be sufficient to frame the question in terms of the influence of ‘Yahweh-aloneism’ in Israel and Judah, in the pre-exilic period and subsequently. For it is hard to dissociate the development of the unique Israelite literary tradition from ques-tions of world-view, and in almost any ancient society world-view and religion overlap substantially. Certain it is that a comparable narrative-historical tradition did not develop in the surrounding cultures, even where and when the high gods became exceedingly
‘high’. Moreover, if there was no prior Israelite epic tradition, as Talmon has argued,44 the rise of the narrative tradition is the more obviously in need of explanation, since it is then not simply a ‘prosification’ of older epic material.
This development of a unique narrative tradition within the literature of the ancient near east is matched by the compar-ative absence of pictorial art and glyptic in ancient Israel, and this too appears to be related to Israelite religious perception, now in its aniconic/iconoclastic mode. The ban on images was
‘the ruin of their art, but the making of their religion’, wrote
43D.M. Gunn, ‘Hebrew Narrative’, in: A.D.H. Mayes (ed.), Text and Con-text: Essays by Members of the Society for Old Testament Study, Oxford 2000, 234.
44Talmon, ‘The “Comparative Method”’, 353-4.
D.L. Edwards in a popular volume of his a quarter of a century ago.45 Whether the ‘ban’ was the cause or merely a reflex of an underlying tendency, there is the likelihood of a connection between the ideology and the absence of the art. A similar thing has been observed of England, which has had its share of icono-clastic revolution. In consequence, England has never competed with the other European countries where the visual arts are con-cerned. On the other hand, a tradition of the written word that is second to none has developed and reached out across the globe.46 This tradition of the word, it is true, is not limited to narrative – Shakespeare appears early on the honours board – but it remains the case that the flow of creative energy has been channelled into the written word in a way that is not true of the visual arts. It appears to have been the same in ancient Israel.
To say no more, however, would be to limit ourselves to the via negativa. The idea that Israel’s God was solely responsible for the created order, controlled and shaped history, and deter-mined the whole course of Israelite national affairs, can justly be claimed as the dynamo that powered the narrative-historical tra-dition within the Old Testament. Other peoples might attribute similar powers to their gods, but polytheism fragments, and even when the gods claimed credit for their doings in history, their vicegerents on earth had a good slice of the glory, as their proud accounts of victory testify. In the Old Testament this is not so, and even Israel’s monumental architecture – whether coincident-ally or otherwise – bears silent witness to the sole claim of Yahweh to glory on the field of battle.47‘Yahweh-aloneism’ indeed! So, al-though it may be an overstatement to claim that monotheism per se gave rise to the Old Testament narrative tradition, the manner of Israel’s recognition of one supreme God created the context in which such a tradition could flourish. In this the consciousness of the special relationship between God and people, as described by Machinist (see above), played its part, as can be illustrated from the larger narrative blocks represented by the books of Kings and
45D.L. Edwards, A Key to the Old Testament, London 1976, 31.
46Cf. J. Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People, London 1998, 109-10.
This ‘civilisation not of the image, but of the word’ is applied more broadly to Protestant Europe by Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, London 1969, 159.
47Cf. 2 Sam. 8:6, 14.
‘Comparativism’ and the God of Israel 59
Chronicles. The writers, or compilers, of these books mention an-nalistic material of the sort that is commonplace within the larger near eastern literary corpus, but they are self-consciously creat-ing a different type of literature in which they recount the story, extending over several centuries, of a people and its God.